The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO

By James Stavridis

After he was selected to be NATO’s sixteenth Supreme Allied Commander, The New York Times described Jim Stavridis as a “Renaissance admiral.” A U. S. Naval Academy graduate with a master’s degree and doctorate from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, conversant in both French and Spanish, this author of numerous books and articles impressed the Navy’s leaders and senior Pentagon civilians with his wide range of interests, educational background, keen understanding of strategic doctrine, mastery of long-range planning, and command of international affairs. Since NATO had previously been led by generals, Stavridis saw his assignment as the first admiral to take command as somewhat “accidental.” As the American and NATO commander in Europe responsible for 120,000 coalition troops serving in fifty-one nations, on three continents and at sea he had come a long way since almost leaving the Navy for law school five years after receiving his commission. The Accidental Admiral offers an intimate look at the challenges of directing NATO operations in Afghanistan, military intervention in Libya, and preparation for possible war in Syria—as well as worrying about the Balkans, cyber threats, and piracy, all while cutting NATO by a third due to budget reductions by the twenty-eight nations of the alliance. More than just describing the history of the times, Stavridis also shares his insights into the personalities of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel, Afghan President Hamid Karzai; Generals David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and many more. Known as an innovator and an early adopter of technology and social media, Stavridis’ ability to think “outside the box” and sail in uncharted waters is unmatched. He shares his insights on leadership, strategic communications, planning, and the convergence of threats that will confront the United States and its allies in the near future. Stavridis is an advocate of the use of “Smart Power,” which he defines as the balance of hard and soft power. He explains that in creating security in the twenty-first century it is critical to build bridges, not walls, and stresses the need to connect international, interagency, and public-private actors to achieve security.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612517827

Book preview

THE ACCIDENTAL

ADMIRAL

BOOKS BY ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS

Partnership for the Americas:

Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command

Destroyer Captain:

Lessons of a First Command

Watch Officer’s Guide,

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Editions

Division Officer’s Guide,

Tenth Edition

BOOKS CO-AUTHORED BY ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS

Command at Sea,

Fifth and Sixth Editions

Watch Officer’s Guide,

Fifteenth Edition

Division Officer’s Guide,

Ninth and Eleventh Editions

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2014 by Adm. James G. Stavridis, USN (Ret.)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stavridis, James.

The accidental admiral : a sailor takes command at NATO / Adm. James Stavridis, USN (Ret.).

1 online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-61251-782-7 (ePub) 1.Stavridis, James. 2.Admirals—United States—Biography. 3.United States. Navy—Officers—Biography. 4.North Atlantic Treaty Organization—Biography. 5.United States—History, Military—20th century. 6.United States—History, Military—21st century. 7.United States—Armed Forces—Technological innovations—Anecdotes. I. Title. II. Title: Sailor takes command at NATO.

E745.S675

359.0092—dc23

[B]

2014025183

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

222120191817161514987654321

First printing

For Laura, Christina, and Julia

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 YOU WANT TO SEND ME WHERE?

Chapter 2 TWO JOBS, TWO COUNTRIES, ONE HOUSE

Chapter 3 AFGHANISTAN: Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

Chapter 4 LIBYA: Qaddafi’s Last Stand

Chapter 5 SYRIA: Through a Glass Darkly

Chapter 6 THE BALKANS: Where Old Ghosts Die Hard

Chapter 7 ISRAEL: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Chapter 8 RUSSIA: Why Can’t We Just Get Along?

Chapter 9 LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES AND PITFALLS: McChrystal, Petraeus, Allen, . . . and Me

Chapter 10 TRICKS OF THE TRADE: How Leaders Make Things Happen

Chapter 11 THE POSTMAN NEVER RINGS TWICE: Strategic Communication

Chapter 12 REQUIEM FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING?

Chapter 13 INNOVATION: The Father of All Necessity

Chapter 14 NATO: Quo Vadis?

Chapter 15 WHAT KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT: Convergence

Chapter 16 GOING ASHORE

Appendix A. Gen. John Kelly’s E-mail on the Death of His Son, Robert

Appendix B. The North Atlantic Treaty

Appendix C. The NATO Lisbon Summit Declaration

Appendix D. Reading List

Index

PREFACE

A tweet: in less than 140 characters I accidentally encapsulated my time as supreme allied commander at NATO. It was October 2011, and I was preparing to recommend to the North Atlantic Council ambassadors that we conclude combat operations in Libya. For the previous 8 months we had been pounding the Libyan regime daily using precision-guided munitions on our UN-authorized mission to protect the people of Libya from the brutal Qaddafi regime. After more than 24,000 strikes and 3,000 at-sea intercepts, it was clear that the people of Libya were in control of their own destiny, and I felt it was time for us to call a halt to Operation Unified Protector.

But I caused a diplomatic stir by sending out a tweet to the world explaining what I would recommend to the twenty-eight ambassadors later that day. News organizations picked it up, and soon the story of the first war whose end was announced on Twitter was making the rounds. When I went to Brussels to brief the ambassadors, I faced some resistance—not because anyone wanted to continue combat operations, but because I had violated some unwritten rule on diplomatic communications. The French ambassador, a good friend, in particular seemed quite miffed about my faux pas.

Such is NATO, where no innovation goes unchallenged, even in good cause. But the good news was that it was good news. The council accepted the recommendation a few days later, and the most successful NATO operation of my time in command came to a reasonably happy outcome. I continue to tweet early and often.

At the beginning of my Navy career I never dreamed that I would end up a four-star admiral in command of all NATO operations and would tweet the end of a war. In fact, my plan was to graduate from Annapolis, serve for the obligatory five years, and head off to law school. Yet I sailed on well past the five-year limit and recently finished thirty-seven years in uniform. It all seems an accidental outcome in so many ways, as is true for nearly everyone’s life, I suppose. Our plans never quite survive contact with the real world.

My plan collided with reality this way. As my five-year commitment ended in early 1981, I had applications in at Yale Law School (wait-listed) and a number of other prestigious schools of law (accepted at several). I had submitted my resignation to the Navy and was about to begin what I hoped would be an interesting (and profitable) career as a corporate lawyer.

Then Mike Mullen called me. At the time, the future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a lieutenant commander working in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He had been a company officer at Annapolis during my time there and was an early mentor who helped me decide on the surface Navy (as opposed to submarines, aviation, or the Marine Corps).

Stavridis, what is this I hear about you getting out? was his opening line, delivered as usual without preamble or foreplay.

I explained why I wanted to go to law school, assured him that I had loved the Navy but really wanted to try something else, and laid out what I thought was a defendable argument for my exodus.

You want law school. OK. Let me try and get the Navy to send you to a law school. I’ll call you back. Dial tone.

The next day he called and offered to have the Navy send me to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I pointed out that Fletcher was not a law school but a school of international relations. His comment: It has ‘law’ in the name. And it is hard to get orders to it. So you better take it now.

I was assigned to an aircraft carrier at the time, operating out of semi-tropical north Florida, my home. I liked my job, although it was hard work in the engineering department. Several other factors came to bear about the same time. One was my real affection for the sea and perhaps the beginnings of a belief that one day I could be a reasonably good officer and perhaps even a sea captain. Another was more prosaic: the cost of law school. Navy lieutenants at the time were unlikely to sock away a lot of money, and I had not done so. And the third, delightful factor was that I had recently become engaged to my lovely future wife, Laura. A Navy junior herself, Laura, it seemed to me, would be happier in the embrace of the Navy family. A Navy scholarship to graduate school to study international relations would guarantee that, at least for the three-year obligation period following. And Laura wanted to study international relations as well, which had been her undergraduate major.

So I stayed in the Navy and studied at the Fletcher School, ultimately graduating with a PhD. Laura went to Boston University to do her graduate work, also in international relations.

In many ways that was the pivotal moment in my career—that nexus in time we all face when two roads permanently and irrevocably part and a decision is made. While I toyed again with getting out several more times in my career, essentially the die was cast at that moment. The decision to stay in the Navy was obviously key, but the decisions (both mine and the Navy personnel system’s) that led to my assignment in 2009 as the supreme allied commander at NATO (SACEUR) began with my time in graduate school studying international relations.

It was at the Fletcher School that I first learned to appreciate the key interplay of politics, economics, finance, business, culture, language, and security. The knowledge and skills I developed there helped me many times throughout the long voyage of my career, and came most pointedly into play in my first four-star assignment—to U.S. Southern Command—and then at NATO. That time in graduate school also began my thinking about an important idea—one that I have written this book to share.

The big lesson that I learned along the way, and which is the underpinning of this book, is in one sense very basic: the world is a diverse and complex place, and single-point silver bullet solutions for its problems will almost always fail. Unilateral action is usually a disappointment; alliances, partnerships, and friendships are everything. We must apply international, interagency, and public-private connections in creating security in the twenty-first century.

And it all must be done in a transparent and open way that leverages our ultimate strengths—the Enlightenment values that undergird all that our nation and the other democracies of the world stand for: liberty, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of education, democracy itself, and on, and on. Ideas must be spread through effective strategic communication using the social networks where the world lives today.

I hope to illuminate not so much what happened during the turbulent four years I spent at NATO from 2009 to 2013. The facts of those years are already well documented and readily available from many sources. The issues were large: Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, cybercrime, cyberterrorism, piracy, missile defense, defense funding cuts, unbalanced spending within the NATO alliance, and many other things both good and ill.

Instead, I want to offer more about "why it happened" and what I learned from it. Perhaps most important from my own personal perspective, I hope to give a glimpse of what it is like to serve as NATO’s supreme allied commander: the successes and failures, the good decisions and mistakes, the high and low points of the voyage. It is a job I never expected—a Navy admiral chosen for what has always been a general’s task. Although I was something of an accidental choice (as you will see in these pages), the voyage was a fascinating one, and from it we may together learn a bit about how to create security in this unsettled and dangerous century.

Finally, I have long believed that we must all dare to read, think, write, and publish. No one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together—no one person, no one nation, no one alliance, no one organization. Our combined knowledge is vastly greater than our individual inputs. So ideas must be shared, and strategic communication—our self-talk—matters deeply.

Throughout my career I have written extensively, not so much to teach others as to help myself learn. At the start of my time as SACEUR I began to keep a journal about my thoughts and experiences in the job. It was only the second time in my career that I had done so (the first being during my first command at sea of a Navy destroyer). By the time I stepped down in May 2013, I had assembled about 250,000 words covering my thoughts during those four tumultuous years. I draw on those contemporaneous insights and feelings often in the course of this book. In many cases, the quotes I include were directly recorded in my journal. In other instances, they are re-created to the best of my recollection.

What I hope to show in this volume is that in our complex world, the best approach is an honest recognition that things will fail, mistakes will be made, and the costs will be high. But we can succeed in creating security for our nations by working together with allies, partners, and friends; by creating true interagency cooperation in our own executive branch; and by partnering with the private sector, in which the real power of this nation resides.

I would offer a final word about the people in the U.S. Department of Defense and the free militaries of the NATO alliance, virtually all volunteers in the cause of freedom. More than two thousand years ago, the nascent Greek democracy faced an existential threat from the empire of Persia. The Persians came with a mighty fleet of triremes to conquer Greece, and they outnumbered the Greek fleet by more than five to one. Yet the Greek fleet’s Athenian admiral, Themistocles, knew that he had one crucial advantage: his rowers were all free men, while the Persian fleet was manned overwhelmingly by slaves.

The night before the battle in the Bay of Salamis outside Athens, Themistocles gathered the captains of all his trireme galleys. He told them to tell their men four things the next day at dawn before they rowed into battle: Tomorrow, you must row for your parents. Tomorrow, you must row for your children. Tomorrow, you must row for your city. And tomorrow, you must row for freedom. The Greeks destroyed the Persian fleet, and the values of democracy, freedom, and liberty were saved, eventually to be passed on to us.

The NATO alliance and the good men and women who serve it today continue to row for freedom. I am proud to have spent four years with them at the oars. This book is the story of that voyage.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I must say thank you to the hundreds of thousands of NATO troops representing the twenty-eight nations of the world’s strongest alliance who served under my command during my four years as the supreme allied commander for operations. Their courage, honor, and commitment to all of the missions we undertook left me deeply grateful that they were willing to stand and deliver operationally in Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counterpiracy, air policing, cyberdefense, and many other demanding tasks. Too many died in Afghanistan; for the rest of my life I will honor their sacrifice in my memory and hold their families in my heart.

This book would never have been completed without the steadfast and wise advice, counsel, and editorial support of Capt. Bill Harlow, USN (Ret.). A truly professional Navy public affairs officer for decades, he also served brilliantly in that role at the CIA. He has been the finest of friends and shipmates throughout the voyage of The Accidental Admiral, and I owe him a debt of deep gratitude for more than two decades of friendship, as well as a free lunch for life.

Throughout my time at NATO in Belgium and U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, I was surrounded by talented men and women from the United States and many other countries. In particular, I was blessed with friendship and advice from my various deputies, senior enlisted advisors, State Department political advisors, and executive assistants. Among many others, several stand out: General Sir John McColl and General Sir Richard Shirreff of the British Army were my NATO deputies. At U.S. European Command I was blessed to have Lt. Gen. Jack Gardner and Vice Adm. Charlie Martoglio. My senior enlisted advisors were Command Sgt. Major Mike Balch, Command Master Chief Roy Maddocks, and Command Sgt. Maj. Todd Small. My executive assistants were Rear Adm. Jamie Foggo, Maj. Gen. Greg Lengyel, and Brig. Gen. Roger Cloutier. The State Department sent me a superb pair of political advisors, both of whom became civilian deputies at U.S. European Command: Ambassador Larry Butler and Ambassador Kate Canavan. All were outstanding and remain close friends today.

On the NATO side, I was able to work closely with two brilliant secretaries general: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer of the Netherlands and Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark. Two chairmen of the Military Committee of NATO were likewise outstanding in their energy and determination to see NATO succeed: Admiral Giampaolo di Paola of Italy (who went on to be an exceptionally competent minister of defense) and General Knud Bartels of Denmark. I owe a great deal to this group of four friends, who provided generous support as we rowed together in the galley of NATO.

My bosses back in Washington supported me well throughout the four years: Secretaries of Defense Bob Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel are outstanding public servants for whom I was lucky to serve. The two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. Marty Dempsey, were likewise exceptional.

Luckily, I have a wide circle of personal friends from within both the military and the larger civilian world. So many people have helped me in the four years of NATO that I cannot name them individually, but to each I owe a great deal.

I am blessed with the fleet’s best mom, Shirley Stavridis—she spent decades as a Marine Corps wife as she and my father, a USMC colonel, shaped my life and launched me into my career. Likewise I have wonderful in-laws, Capt. Bob Hall, USN (Ret.), and his wife, Joan.

Finally and most important, I will never be able to fully express how much I owe to my lovely wife, Laura; nor how much I love her. We have sailed together for well over three decades and the horizon is as bright as ever. She also is the perfect mother of our two daughters, Christina and Julia, who make me proud every day. They are the center of my life and the stars I steer by.

CHAPTER 1

YOU WANT TO SEND ME WHERE?

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

— Lao Tzu

Often in my dreams I am at sea on a ship again. I’m either the captain—a middle-aged man in my late thirties, in command, feeling serious but pleased with my seemingly heavy responsibilities—or, on increasingly infrequent occasions, a happy young junior officer in my early twenties standing watch and giving rudder orders to the helmsman. Then it gets hard. We are always approaching the shore after a long voyage. There is a pier, which looks safe and simple to approach; but at the last minute, some unseen higher commander orders us to proceed up a river, always the worst place for a warship.

At first it goes well; there is plenty of water and sunlight, and the channel is well marked. But after a time, the banks of the river close in and heavy foliage on both shores prevents me from seeing what dangers may threaten my ship. All very Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness. The worst part is that the river grows increasingly shallow. Soon we are simply skimming along on a plane of mud, and I cannot imagine how the ship stays upright; it should tip over. But somehow we are cruising along, and I am adding power to the engines to keep us precariously thrusting forward, awaiting the ship’s inevitable fall to one side or the other.

Then I awake.

I walked out of the office of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in February 2008 feeling slightly disoriented. He had just asked me to become the first Navy admiral to serve as the supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The position, known by the acronym SACEUR, was first held by Dwight Eisenhower. Since Ike, an unbroken line of fifteen generals had done the job. For a guy who never expected to make it beyond lieutenant, it was an awesome prospect—in the literal meaning of the word. And it came with a second four-star assignment—the term in the military is dual-hatted—as commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM). I would have two headquarters, more than three hundred miles apart; two distinct staffs; and a world of challenges. I was flattered and honored—but I asked for some time to think about it before I said yes.

After thirty-two years of commissioned service following my graduation from Annapolis in 1976, I was still relatively young at fifty-three and excited about my career. I was certainly hopeful of another assignment, but before my visit with Bob Gates that morning I would have guessed that I was about to be offered the job of commander at U.S. Pacific Command, traditionally a Navy post.

Yet the offer to go to Europe was not a complete surprise: I was close to finishing my three-year tour as the combatant commander of U.S. Southern Command, responsible for all Department of Defense activity south of the United States. I was the first Navy officer to land that job as well. My area of focus comprised 45 countries and territories, 16 million square miles, and well over 500 million people. I loved the job and had spent much of my time—nearly 70 percent—traveling throughout the Americas. My Spanish had improved to the point that I conducted all my meetings with my interlocutors from down south in Spanish, and I was studying Portuguese. From my headquarters in Miami I led a team of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and defense civilians engaged in security cooperation and operations.

But all good things end, and it was clear that I would either take on a new assignment or be asked to retire after nearly thirty-three years of commissioned service. I was comfortable either way. My nomination for the job in Europe made some sense. I spoke reasonable French and Spanish, and my PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (the nation’s oldest school of international relations) had a strong concentration in European studies—history, politics, NATO, and security studies. Laura had lived in Europe for six years as a child and spoke French, and I had lived for three years in Greece as a child myself. I had operated extensively under NATO command at sea in the Mediterranean over the years, and during my time as senior military assistant to the secretary of defense we had gone to many, many conferences and meetings engaging the NATO allies.

I considered myself reasonably well qualified to help manage the three great issues facing NATO: Afghanistan, where almost 100,000 NATO troops were in combat against the Taliban; Russia, a difficult and contentious relationship with a huge downside if we could not get it right; and the geostrategic future of the alliance itself. Kosovo and the Balkans were also concerns, although things seemed to be going, as I would come to say later, suspiciously well there. Not a single admiral, however, had ever been assigned to the twin positions of SACEUR and EUCOM—command of NATO’s forces and all of the U.S. forces in a geographic area that includes Europe, Russia, Israel, and a major segment of the Atlantic. It was daunting to consider following in the footsteps of Dwight Eisenhower, Alexander Haig, John Shalikashvili, Wesley Clark, Joseph Ralston, James Jones, and all the others.

I was glad that I would continue to work for Bob Gates if I took the job. Gates was a career CIA officer, Russia expert, and PhD with Russian-language skills, and above all a steady hand amid the controversy and challenges of Washington, D.C. I was happy to continue on Adm. Mike Mullen’s team as well. He is a lifelong mentor and a superb chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Another plus was the chance to work with Gen. James Jones, who had just been selected to be national security advisor to newly elected President Barack Obama. General Jones had been both the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the supreme allied commander in Europe. A bilingual French speaker who grew up in Switzerland, he had been a fine example and occasional mentor to me for more than a decade, and I knew I could count on him for solid advice and counsel in my new job. At least I can practice my French with him, I thought. But above all else, in my heart I was not quite ready to hang up my uniform.

Laura, my beautiful blonde wife of twenty-eight years, and I sat in Central, a relatively new restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, and talked about the pluses and minuses of the assignment to NATO. We’d chosen a French bistro–style spot to discuss the job. I knew Laura’s sharp judgment and deep knowledge of Europe would be invaluable assets in the tour—she had even attended three years of high school in Belgium while her father, a Navy captain, was assigned to the NATO mission in Brussels. We agreed that the only real downside about going to SACEUR would be leaving south Florida and accepting the geographical separation from our two daughters and our aging but fortunately still vigorous parents.

And Laura and I loved Miami—a gorgeous city, one of the most beautiful in the country with its sweeping harbor, sunny beaches, lovely art deco buildings, and bustling Latino culture. More than half of the metro area’s residents were born in other countries, and well over 60 percent of conversations are conducted in Spanish. Miami is truly sui generis. I also had in hand a reasonable prospect of a fantastic job working for Donna Shalala, the president of the University of Miami, a person I deeply admire and respect. But despite our love for Miami and the chance of a good job in academia, we both quickly came to the conclusion that I could not say no to the opportunity I had just been offered to serve in Europe.

We returned to Miami and started preparing for a midsummer move. Like all military families, we had moved many, many times before. Both Laura and I grew up in the military, I in a Marine Corps family—my father was a decorated infantry officer—and Laura the daughter of a naval aviator. Even before we married in 1981, our combined moves exceeded twenty, including between us three tours in Europe. Since our marriage we’d pulled up stakes and moved thirteen times, often going coast-to-coast in the typical roller-coaster of a military career.

Yet, surprisingly, this was the first time in my career that I would be based overseas. Although my ships had made numerous deployments, Laura and our two daughters had always been homeported in the United States. This new assignment came at a complicated time for our high school senior, Julia. Like most young people about to leave the nest and head to college, Julia had been hoping to be reasonably close to us, especially for the first year or two. At one point, when it had looked like a job in Hawaii was an option, she had applied and been accepted at the University of Hawaii. But with the posting to Belgium, there was no U.S. collegiate option for her any closer than the U.S. East Coast, a long six-hour flight away. We spent much of the weekend discussing the options and trying to focus Julia on the huge upside of the assignment for her—trips to Europe, a built-in summer experience, the chance to learn French—and she gradually squared her shoulders and settled into the idea. A disciplined figure skater and a fine student, Julia would be a success wherever she went to college, and as a Navy junior she had learned to roll with the punches.

The move was a similar surprise to Julia’s older sister, Christina, who had recently graduated from the University of Virginia and was working at Google in San Francisco. Like her sister, Christina had hoped her mom and dad would be posted to Hawaii, which would have put us close to her on the U.S. West Coast. She had turned down a job with Google in Dublin, Ireland, earlier in the year, betting on our coming west. But like Julia, Christina has great reserves of character and flexibility, and after a couple of long phone calls with Laura, she too was focusing clearly on the new home port—Mons, Belgium.

While the secretary of defense proposes people for jobs like the one I had been asked to consider, the position is not the secretary’s to award. The president must nominate officers for such jobs; the Senate must confirm those appointments; and in the case of senior NATO assignments, the North Atlantic Council’s twenty-eight ambassadors must also approve. So once I had decided in principle that I would take the job, I had to go through several more steps before it was all nailed down.

On a cold Wednesday afternoon in Washington, I was summoned to the White House to meet President Obama.

I had read Dreams from My Father some months before (it was the first book I downloaded to my Kindle) and found it reassuring to know that our new president was a fine writer—the book has real literary quality—as well as clearly being highly intelligent, adaptable, internationally oriented, and manifestly curious. Good qualities indeed in a leader. And I resonated to his no drama style, which was part of my bedrock approach to leadership.

Over the years I had met five presidents—Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes—so this was not the first time I would be shaking hands with the leader of the Free World. But the circumstances—a chat about my next job, an important one in the context of the Department of Defense—were different. So my nerves were running high as I went through the normal routine of a day in Washington—a speech, several calls on key congressional leaders, and a quick lunch in my small Pentagon office.

Reviews for The Accidental Admiral

[squeakychu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I very much enjoyed reading about the thoughts and experiences of Admiral Stavridis in his role as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO for four years. I most liked the chapters about Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, the Balkans, Israel, and Russia. Those chapters gave me a deeper insight into those problematic areas of the world. I was less interested in reading through the text of the North Atlantic Treaty and the NATO Lisbon Summit Declaration, and I only skimmed through those appendices.